


Kevlar People

by gurli



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: M/M, Mentions of hostage situations, Mild Blood, also implied ptsd if you look very closely, mentions of war and violence, sort of detective!au, the sulay is very heavily implied but not explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 02:39:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4462229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gurli/pseuds/gurli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because real life has never lived up to his expectations, Junmeyon is having coffee with his mother in the sun when he gets the call.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kevlar People

**Author's Note:**

> this was a prompt from tumblruser baek-to-the-basics and i honestly have no idea where it went :-) cross-posted on tumblr in a slightly less edited version...

Because real life never has been able to live up to his expectations, Junmyeon is having coffee in the sun with his mother when he gets the call. It’s an early Tuesday morning in June, his mother is in town for a business meeting and he managed to take the morning off to meet her up for breakfast. She smiles at him fondly when he excuses himself to take the phone call, ten years ago it would have been the other way around.

“Detective Kim,” he answers, trying to sound official but hurried at the same time, like he has something important to get back to. 

“Hi, it’s Jongdae. There’s a car coming to pick you up, we’re gonna need you on-scene asap. It’s a hostage situation.”

“I have the morning off, Dae, can’t Yixing take it?” Junmyeon rolls a stray pebble under his shoe and his mother keeps smiling understandingly at him.

“He he did. But the communication is down, Junmyeon - he's, uh, he's not responding.”

The sun keeps shining, his mother keeps smiling and the world doesn’t end. He’s not sure what he says to Jongdae, or his mother, but after maybe ten minutes he’s sitting in the back of a pickup putting on kevlar and trying to let the familiar weight of the gun at his hip calm his racing heart. A techie explains that the situation had been so bad Yixing had opted to go in. That the manor is a big house and they lost contact during what sounded like a brawl. That Yixing hadn’t fired any shots and that the kid came out crying through he front door, unhurt. Junmyeon hears it all but his brain is still white noise. Yixing is not supposed to go in, is all he can think about. Yixing is not supposed to interfere and if it had been any other day Junmyeon would have gone in instead. He doesn’t know if the fact that he can’t properly feel his legs is guilt or worry or both.

Luhan is on-site when he gets there, lips pressed thin and white against each other as he replays a sound clip on his lap top. 

“Hey,” Luhan says.

“Hi,” Junmyeon answers, and it takes less than two minutes before he's inside.

He stalks through the manor’s empty hallways. He’s never been here before, but it's still familiar. There are the standard too-big rooms that nobody knows how to furniture, the usual dust on the picture frames and the same sense of disappointment as any other house he visited as a child. He vaguely recognizes one of the girls in a family photo, but Luhan’s breathing in his ear-piece is too shaky for him to be able to focus on anything other than finding Yixing and finding him alive.

“Three doors down on your left,” Luhan says “Is the kitchen - that’s where we lost him.”

There’s a ripped-out ear-piece ouside the kitchen door, and scruff marks on the door itself. He pushes it open, mindful not to touch the marks. 

Junmyeon shipped out at age eighteen and he still freezes cold when he sees the body on the kitchen floor. Not because it’s gorey, because it is, but because for a second all he sees is dark hair and his vision goes stark white. It’s not Yixing, he tells himself even though he’s not sure, it’s not Yixing and he feels like he actively has to force the air out of his lungs in order to breathe. He steps closer even though his entire body protests. It’s not Yixing. 

“Can I, uh” he says into his mic after a second “Can I have the perp’s details?”

“Caucasian male, 35 years, brown hair and medium build. Why?”

“He’s out. The perp, I mean, has been located. On the kitchen floor,” Junmyeon has to swallow the bile that rises in his throat as he crouches down to press two fingers to the remains of the body's jugular “Dead.”

He doesn’t hear Luhan’s answer. There are faint traces of blood leading towards what has to be the pantry, and he follows them with his gun held at attention and his heart beating too fast. He knocks the door open with the tip of his boot, and on the floor next to a sack of potatoes is the familiar outline of Yixing’s spine. He’s breathing even though Junmyeon isn’t, but he's not moving.

Reckless as he’s always been, Junmyeon crumbles down on his knees together with the world. The gun clatters on the tiled floor and the entire universe is tilted sideways.

“Yixing,” he says, “Yixing it’s me. It’s Junmyeon, are you okay?”

He should know better, does know better, than to pull Yixing’s body up into a sitting position but still does it. He doesn’t check for bleeding or trauma, he isn’t even gentle about it - he is is desperation in standard-issue clothing and he can’t even cry. Yixing’s fingers scramble to hold on to the kevlar vest and not for the first time, Junmyeon wishes you could make entire humans out of kevlar.

“Yixing,” he whispers into the familiar black head of hair “Yixing, please. Are you hurt?” 

He doesn’t get a spoken answer. It takes a second too long, but he feels the slight inclination of Yixing’s head. He tightens his hold. When they were in seventh grade, Junmeyon broke his left leg when jumping from a tree and Yixing carried him all the way to the nurse’s office. Now he repays the favour. 

“I killed him,” Yixing says when they’re out in the hallway, small voice loud in the empty mansion “With a table knife. I killed him.”

“I know,” Junmyeon says. 

“I killed him,” Yixing is crying now, and Junmyeon wishes he could settle inside his bones because no matter how hard he holds Yixing he can’t seem to get close enough. 

As the paramedics guide them into the waiting ambulance, Junmyeon realizes with sudden startling clarity that he’s forgotten how many people he’s killed. He says people and not soldiers because that’s how it is, and it still doesn’t hurt as much to think about as looking at Yixing’s trembling body does. He doesn’t feel bad.

He holds Yixing’s hand as the doctor goes through a routine check-up and thinks about the way a sniper rifle feels when it’s braced against your  conscience, when your hands are steady in the burning Kosovo sun. He holds the hand Yixing held the table knife in and thinks about how much heavier it must have been in the overhead lighting of the kitchen. Yixing stops crying half-way through the exam and then he doesn’t cry again for a month. 

“I don’t,” Yixing says without looking at him, the street lights casting there-again, gone-again shadows over his face when they’re in the cab on their way home “I don’t even know how I got the knife through his skin.”

He holds Yixing’s hand and he’s quiet because he doesn’t know what to say. He holds the hand though the interrogations and the talks with the psychiatrist and the funeral that Yixing insists on attending. He holds the hand when Yixing wears the guilt like a blanket and when the guilt fades. He holds the hand when Yixing gets cleared for duty again. After three months he finally knows the answer.

“Because you had to. Because you love life. Because you had to,” he mumbles into Yixing’s hand and he hopes Yixing knows it too.

**Author's Note:**

> if you didn't hate this find me on tumblr @zitaotrash


End file.
